The Big Lie

The most terrifying thing about Trump is his increasingly blatant inclination toward autocracy. Inclination may be too nice a word for it.

A huge part of this is Trump’s shameless, undisguised lying. “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory,” one of his lawyers told Vanity Fair nearly thirty years ago. “If you say something again and again, people will believe you.”

The Big Lie is pure Hitler, and Trump is – or was then – a reader of the Führer’s speeches. I don’t know the exact origins of the Big Lie, but Hitler coined the phrase in Mein Kampf. He wrote that people simply cannot believe anyone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.”

Like Trump and his “fake news” lie.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, said “the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly – it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”

Trump and his minions have been doing just that. Now they are raising the stakes with new, unbridled bullshit about a “secret society” within the Justice Department, one intent on bringing Trump down. [Update: now they are backing off that claim.]

Where is the powerful senator putting country above party – speaking plain truth about all that is wrong with this picture?

One senator said: “It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques – techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.”

Strong words – but they were spoken nearly seventy years ago by Margaret Chase Smith, a Republican Senator from Maine. Taken from her famous “Declaration of Conscience,” they were in opposition to Sen. Joseph McCarthy during his reign of terror.

“I speak as a Republican,” she said. “I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States Senator. I speak as an American.” And all Americans, she said, have “the right to criticize; the right to hold unpopular beliefs; the right to protest, the right of independent thought.”

The country survived McCarthy, but I’m not so sure it will survive Trump. He is a wannabe autocrat leading us headlong into a totalitarian state.

I keep thinking about this Frank Zappa song:

 

Women's March, Denver

On January 20, the 2018 Women’s March drew more than fifty thousand people to downtown Denver. That’s about half the number that attended last year, but more than enough to send a very clear message to the White House.

The demonstrators included me – although in all honesty, what most drew me were the photo ops.

I attended last year’s Denver march, too. I heard a joke around that time, possibly from Stephen Colbert: Trump set a new record for being rejected by more women in a single day than any other man in history.

During last year’s rally the local transit system was totally unprepared for the number of riders, and was quickly overwhelmed. I ended up hitching a ride, thanks to the kindness of strangers. Recalling that, I went up to the bus stop at 5am this time, and wound up at Union Station downtown way, way too early. But I knew that might happen, and brought enough reading material to easily kill a few hours in a bagel place.

The march was set to begin at 10am, with a rally starting at nine. That horde of fifty thousand represented a good cross-section of America, with women and men of all ages and colors. It impressed me to see so many people simultaneously cheerful, upbeat, and pissed off.

“This is not just a white women’s movement,” one woman was quoted in the local press. “We have to stand in solidarity with the many people that are not just rich white men, who have not been given equal rights, opportunities, housing and jobs. It’s about how important it is that everyone has a story and these stories can inspire us to fight for change.”

The rally began with a prayer, said in Navajo. I couldn’t understand a word. Just before delivering it, the speaker said in English that its themes were peace, love, and unity. I support these ideals but suspect they are alien to Trump.

No One Stopped Him

Preet Bharara is the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, a post he held for about eight years. In March 2017, AG Sessions ordered Bharara and forty-five other U.S. Attorneys appointed during the Obama era to resign. Bharara would not comply, so Trump canned him.

About a month later Bharara joined the faculty of the New York University School of Law, and soon after that launched a podcast called Stay Tuned with Preet. A promotional video showed up on Facebook last summer, which is how I heard about it, and after listening to just one episode I became a fan.

That’s the background to why I’m writing this post. Last December Bharara interviewed Tina Brown, the writer and former editor of Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and The Daily Beast, among others. Like most Stay Tuned segments, I found it interesting and informative. But Brown’s comments on Trump were especially riveting.

She described how during her tenure at Vanity Fair, the magazine published a profile on Trump called “After the Gold Rush.” Ostensibly about the breakup of Trump’s first marriage, it also went into his background, and rise as a real estate magnate.

The 1990 article was written by Marie Brenner, but Brown (right) shared some of her own experiences with Stay Tuned listeners. At first, she said, she liked Trump. She thought of him as a rascal, but fresh – “all those kind of slightly friendly words that imply that somebody is an enjoyable con man, right? But then, as the years go by, he gets less and less enjoyable. And by the end ... I see him as a fraud, a malignant fraud.”

What changed? Bharara asked. Does anything in particular stand out?

“I think it might have been the moment with Marie Brenner, who’s reporting on him for our magazine, saw Hitler’s speeches on his desk,” Brown replied. Brenner included seeing the speeches in her article, “and [Trump] was so outraged that he then poured a drink down her dress at an event.”

Yow.

Vanity Fair published “After the Gold Rush” on September 1, 1990. It’s quite a read; you should check it out.

Among many other things, Marie Brenner quotes one of Trump’s lawyers: “Donald is a believer in the big-lie theory ... If you say something again and again, people will believe you.” Brenner asked Trump about that and he was furious. He told her if he could identify the lawyer, “I’d fire his ass.”

And those Hitler speeches? Brown told Preet Bharara that Brenner saw them on Trump’s desk. Actually, Brenner wrote that she’d heard Trump sometimes “reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed.” She asked Trump about that, too. He said it wasn’t My New Order, but a copy of Mein Kampf, given to him by a friend – “And he’s a Jew.”

Brenner tracked the friend down. He confirmed the gift but said it was indeed the book of speeches, “not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”

Trump, Brenner noted, “is no reader or history buff. Perhaps his possession of Hitler’s speeches merely indicates an interest in Hitler’s genius at propaganda. The Führer often described his defeats at Stalingrad and in North Africa as great victories.”

Near the end of this 1990 article, and quite apart from the matter of Hitler, Brenner wrote that as the years went by, “Trump became more than a vulgarian ... [he] appeared to believe that his money gave him a freedom to set the rules. No one stopped him. His exaggerations and baloney were reported, and people laughed ... [everyone] allowed Trump to exist in a universe where all reality had vanished.”

Sour Grape

Colorado voters approved recreational marijuana in 2012, and the new law went into effect at the start of 2014. Other states have enacted similar laws, most recently California. All of them are superseded by Federal law, under which marijuana remains very, very bad. But for now, at least, it's legal in the Rocky Mountain State.

Marijuana doesn’t interest me the way it once did. But the reality of commercially available marijuana proved irresistible, so I visited a pot shop recently to report on the experience.

I don’t want to identify the place by name, so let’s call it GoldenBuds. It’s located in a strip mall about half a mile from my home, alongside a credit union, a dry cleaner, an Indian restaurant, a Tae kwon Do place, a hairdresser, and a DMV office. (There is another such emporium within the proverbial stone’s throw.)

The first thing I noticed when walking in was its cheerless front anteroom, complete with pale green walls and faded, threadbare carpet. The whole set-up felt temporary, like an election headquarters or a Halloween costume store. But this is no fly-by-night operation. Recreational marijuana is a growth industry.

Nor could I help noticing the security. An employee waited behind a small window covered in thick plexiglass. I shoved my driver’s license through a slot at the bottom to prove I was at least twenty-one (as if there could be any doubt). The guy looked at my ID, looked at me, then shoved the license back through the slot and buzzed me in.

An array of marijuana products awaited in this main room: edibles and drinkables, and the sort of paraphernalia common to what used to be known as head shops. My attention was drawn to a glass case, like in a jeweler’s, which held a dozen or more lidded glass jars. Each contained various strains of marijuana, with names like Purple Haze, AK-47, Agent Orange, Hindu Kush, and Northern Lights.

“May I help you?” asked the guy behind the counter, a young man with the requisite tattoos and piercings of his age group.

I wanted to say: “I’d like a dime bag.” I wanted to say: “A lid of your finest, please.” But he might not have understood these antiquated terms; this is not your father’s marijuana.

Each strain costs the same, he said – twenty dollars per gram. (There is also under-the-counter “shake,” the less-desirable loose stuff, at reduced cost.) He lifted a few of those jars onto the counter. “What do you want it for? Pain relief, or just ordinary recreational use?”

To get high, you nitwit! That’s what I wanted to say. But good manners prevailed. “Just something I can relax with, and play guitar.”

The guy recommended a strain called Sour Grape. “Very mellow. Good for jamming.” He removed the lid from one of the jars, and the familiar aroma of potent marijuana wafted up to my nostrils. Obviously, this was strong stuff.

Like most produce, you can buy Colorado marijuana in bulk. I had him weigh a tiny amount. GoldenBuds does not accept credit cards, debit cards or checks, so I paid in untraceable cash – just like in the old days.

My Sour Grape came in a white plastic container slightly larger than a film canister, once the preferred means of transporting the evil weed. Beneath the GoldenBuds logo, the label said: “This product is infused with marijuana. Child resistant container. Ingredients: marijuana, water, organic fertilizer, natural additives.”

Outside, I jumped on my bike and rode home. What happened next? Did my dedication to truth insist I sample the purchase? Of course not.